_relative character_ by which is tested every other pleasure
coming under that denomination; namely, by the entire absence
of _self_, that is, by the same freedom from all personal
consideration which has been shown to characterize the true effect of
the Three leading Ideas already considered. But if to this also it be
further objected, that in certain particular cases, as of
personal danger,--from which the sublime emotion has often been
experienced,--some personal consideration must necessarily be
involved, as without a sense of security we could not enjoy it; we
answer, that, if it be meant only that the mind should be in such a
state as to enable us to receive an unembarrassed impression, it seems
to us superfluous,--an obvious truism placed in opposition to an
absurd impossibility. We needed not to be told, that no pleasurable
emotion is likely to occur while we are unmanned by fear. The same
might be said, also, in respect to the Beautiful: for who was ever
alive to it under a paroxysm of terror, or pain of any kind? A
terrified person is in any thing but a fit state for such emotion. He
may indeed _afterwards_, when his fear is passed off, contemplate
the circumstance that occasioned it with a different feeling; but the
object of his dismay is _then_ projected, as it were, completely
from himself; and he feels the sublimity in a contemplative state:
he can feel it in no other. Nor is that state incompatible with a
consciousness of peril, though it can never be with personal terror.
And, if it is meant that we should have a positive, present
conviction that we are in no danger, this we must deny, as we find it
contradicted in innumerable instances. So far, indeed, is a sense of
security from being essential to the condition of a sublime emotion,
that the sense of danger, on the contrary, is one of its most exciting
accompaniments. There is a fascination in danger which some persons
neither can nor would resist; which seems, as it were, to disenthral